A Black Kid Named Pete

On nicknames, soda machines, and the death of my innocence.

Photo Credit: Grand America Jukebox

I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Our home was in a primarily Black neighborhood within walking distance of the city’s downtown area.

We moved to the small town south of Little Rock after our parents took jobs as managers at the local Dillard’s Department Store. Although I spent equal amounts of my childhood in both cities, Pine Bluff is where I came of age.

Those days were like heaven for a young Black boy still finding his way. It was 1970, but our relocation was like stepping back in time. Railroad tracks divided the street in our residential neighborhood. If we needed ice, there was an old-fashioned icehouse a short bike ride away.

There were two Boy’s Clubs in the town, one for Black children and one for white kids. Believe it or not, the segregated location was known as “The White Boys’ Club.” When I moved to the town, I thought the club’s name was in honor of a person whose last name was White.

On most nights, the rhythmic bumping of boxcars lulled me to sleep. Even now, I can hear the slow, squealing sound of a late-night boxcar creeping along the rail spur that curved just feet from our home, winding its way into the loading dock behind The Pine Bluff Commercial, the local newspaper.

One of the first things I discovered was that almost every boy in my new neighborhood had a nickname.

Sammy, a smaller-than-average boy, ironically known as Big Man, lived with his mother in a painfully small three-room home a block or two down the street. Pete and Crow, the lanky twins whose rhyming first names began with the letter “V,” lived a few blocks in the opposite direction.

A few doors from the twins lived Michael, a sullen, red-headed boy everyone called Pick Iron. His nickname was a linguistic snafu, a mispronunciation of pig iron, but as I came to understand during my seven-year stay, the Pine Bluff of my youth had a vernacular all its own. 

Rabbit, an older boy who lived on the other side of the tracks bisecting my street, was the fastest runner on our side of town. Next door to him lived Petey and Newty — not their real names — two brothers who, despite their youth, arose before daybreak on summer mornings, riding away in the rear of a rickety pickup truck for a day of work in the cotton fields. 

None of us dared use the borderline nickname given to Petey and Newty’s father in his presence. After a workplace accident left him wrapped from head to toe in ace bandages for an extended period, a small child from the neighborhood dubbed him ‘Mummy Man.’

Aside from the tag of “New Boy,” I lacked a snappy sobriquet, a sign that my newfound peers never quite accepted me as one of their own.

Individually, we were your typical adolescents. But together, we morphed into a pop-up baseball or football team, whichever activity the season dictated. The barren field alongside The Pine Bluff Commercial became our makeshift baseball diamond or gridiron.

The longer-than-average block stretching between Third and Fourth Streets transformed into an imaginary Olympic arena, perfect for our impromptu track meets. 

When we challenged boys from other neighborhoods, Rabbit was our secret weapon. We ran until the street lights lit up while our mothers watched, cheering from their front porches.

At the end of our make-believe competitions, we headed to a house around the corner for an ice-cold Coke. It wasn’t uncommon to see a tall “drink box” filled with ice-cold sodas on front porches in those days.

As strange as it seems now, back then many small-town families leased Coca-Cola vending machines for extra income. In my neighborhood, a Coke machine filled with sixteen-ounce Cokes, Fantas, or the occasional Mr. Pibb, was a twenty-five-cent lifesaver on the muggy summer days of my youth. 

In my tenth-grade year, I met another Black boy nicknamed Pete. I remember him as a slacker, a wanna-be class clown. Unapologetically, he wore the same wrinkled, miss-buttoned shirt for days at a time. His uncombed hair seemed permanently sprinkled with bits of cerulean blue-colored lint, his elbows always in need of lotion. 

Pete and I weren’t friends. But because he sat next to me, I noticed his absence from history class. Days later, his still-empty desk almost shouted in my direction, “Where is Pete?”

The mystery of his absence was solved midweek when our history teacher informed the class that Pete would never return to Pine Bluff High School.

Pete was dead. 

A few days later, I saw an article in the Pine Bluff Commercial that shed light on my classmate’s misfortune. One night — a school night — Pete broke into a neighborhood coke machine, attempting to steal its cache of coins. Someone saw his crime and summoned the police.

The article stated matter-of-factly that the police shot Pete from behind with a sawed-off shotgun, a weapon that violated law enforcement procedures.

According to the article, there would be a full investigation. 

And with that article, The Story of Pete, the unkempt boy, the wayward student, the jokester, came to an abrupt conclusion.

Weeks later, I still thought about Pete. I had so many questions. How should I feel about our classmate’s death by law enforcement? Why did he run away? Why did policemen need sawed-off shotguns? 

It was the seventies, so there were no grief counselors, no online therapists to help my classmates and me process the violent reality of Pete’s death.

There were no social media-spawned uprisings, no hashtags, no viral tweets, no t-shirts with slogans to memorialize Pete. I often wonder if anyone from that 10th-grade history class even remembers his name.

Whenever that unique brand of tragedy occurs, a form of death seemingly unique to Black boys and men, I remember that mischievous, disheveled boy. Decades later, I still remember his empty desk in tenth-grade history.